Review of A Teacher (2013) by James L — 28 Feb 2017

This film requires a few mental /aesthetic adjustments, and isn't for everybody: briefly, A Teacher might work for you if you're more interested in character than story.

It isn't a "story." The story is boilerplate stuff: a teacher and a student have an affair. No surprises, because the outcome is inevitable.

Rather, the film is a microscope on the emotional body language and psychology of obsession (technically, "limerence" is the word) of impossible desire. And Lindsay Burdge, if you keep your eyes on her, is well worth watching. She nails the way that anxiety and social pressure compress happy love into an obsession that destroys a person's happiness, mental health, and eventually, life.

The cinematography is deliberately claustrophobic, and the shots really long, because the film is aiming at the ambivalence of the central relationship: the love, the lust, the fear, the anxiety, even at times the loathing that one quick look doesn't quite grasp. This movie will bore you if you need something to happen; but it might be your thing if you want to know what it feels like when the small things that happen feel bigger than the whole world.